A top goal of every company in every industry is to create longstanding relationships with their customers. Today, the best way to do that is through the customer experience. Every interaction is an opportunity to create a genuine connection that breeds loyalty and brand ambassadors. However, creating the perfect customer experience can be a challenge. Today’s connected customers demand the same real-time results from their grocery store or bank as they do from a Google search or a conversation with Alexa. The big challenge is how to meet these demands in a scalable and effective way. Enter artificial intelligence (AI).
AI technologies are now being deployed across virtually every type of industry to drive better experiences between customers and brands, according to Dave Campbell, vice president of customer engagement and support solutions at LogMeIn. The benefits of adding AI to the frontlines of customer service are numerous, including being able to offload simple queries away from agents and working on the backend to make agents smarter about customers.
While AI may feel like the silver bullet to all CX challenges, it’s not one-size-fits-all. It needs to be implemented intelligently — put in places where the technology can complement the customer journey — not disrupt it. It should be seamlessly embedded into the customer experience and always have an elegant escalation path to a human agent if necessary.
Making the transition to AI
We are embarking on the next phase of digital customer engagement and AI is a big part of it, Campbell explained. Today’s AI has advanced passed single purpose-built implementations to contextually-based, conversational interactions. It understands the customer’s intent and can either resolve the issue or escalate it to the best resource. And most importantly, modern AI implementations learn with each new request and become smarter and even more valuable over time.
Campbell and his team know something about this. With its recent acquisition of chatbot platform, Nanorep, LogMeIn has now entered the AI space. Nanorep compliments the company’s intelligent customer engagement platform, Bold360 to create a solution designed to help customers provide better, faster and more seamless customer experiences from self-service all the way up to high-touch agent interactions.
Bold360 + Nanorep provides a robust CX solution and it’s important to note that implementing AI does not require a full rip and replace of legacy systems. Nanorep is vendor-neutral and can work with existing systems — like email — to make them more efficient. For example, one LogMeIn customer uses the technology to assist human agents by analyzing customer email requests for intent and routes the messages to the most appropriate person/department. It can also analyze emails immediately and provide a personal response to the customer.
Getting started is easy
Because AI in customer service is relatively new, businesses may be hesitant. Campbell recommends starting slow by incorporating AI into an FAQ or as a precursor to a live chat experience. Customers using these services generally don’t need an immediate response so you aren’t putting the customer experience at risk, but are helping the bot to learn by building up a database of questions and answers that can later be incorporated into a real-time bot interaction. In addition, modern AI technologies don’t require thousands of examples to learn and create a big impact. They can start with a small amount of information and continuously learn as it’s used.
AI is changing the CX game. With the right planning and technology, companies can start seeing value immediately. While it is still a relatively new technology, Campbell advises companies to not sit on the sidelines waiting for it to be perfect. Today’s AI is intelligent and grows right along with you.